The Intruders (16 page)
“Jack—is this supposed to be funny?”
“Does it sound like it’s meant to be funny?” I shouted, finally losing my temper. “Jesus, Bobbi.”
“You want me to walk around to your house, let myself in, and check your machine, to see if Amy’s called?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I understand now that you have no car, and if it’s too much trouble, that’s fine.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” she said. “In fact, I can do better than that.” There was muffled silence, and then someone else came on the line.
“Jack,” the voice said, “where are you?”
For a moment I believed I’d started hearing voices.
“Amy? Is that you?”
“Of course it is,” the voice said calmly. It was like hearing my mother on the phone. My mother is dead. “Why are you in Seattle, Jack?”
“Where…where the hell have you been?”
“I’ve been here,” Amy’s voice said. “Wondering where you are.”
“Didn’t you get my messages? On the answering machine?”
“You know I can’t work that thing. Plus, why would I think you’d leave me a message there?”
I opened my mouth to reply but couldn’t come up with anything at all to say.
“Look, honey, just come home, okay? And drive carefully.” Then she put the phone down, leaving me standing in the street with my mouth hanging wide open.
It began to rain then, with sudden firmness, as if it had meant to start earlier but forgot.
I dropped the Zimmermans’ car outside their house, leaving the keys in the ignition. If Ben had been there, it would have been different. I wasn’t going to deal with Bobbi right now.
Or so I’d thought. She’d evidently been standing behind her door, possibly for the last two hours, and was out of the house before I had time to get away. I took a deep breath. My head hurt badly, and I wasn’t going to give anyone a fight. Unless she asked for it.
“Thank you,” Bobbi said, disconcerting me.
I reached inside the car and got out the keys. “Sorry for the delay, Bobbi, I was just—”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I was harsh earlier.”
I nodded, not really knowing what to say. “I’m sorry to hear about your friend, too. I hope he’s okay.”
She smiled vaguely, and I headed up their driveway, back along the road, and into our own domain. I started slowly, but by the time I got to our house I was striding fast. Our car was standing outside the house. It looked big and black and reproachless.
Nothing strange happening in my life, boss.
I let myself in, closing the door quietly behind me. Took off my coat and walked to the top of the stairs to look down into the living area below.
Amy was sitting in the middle of the sofa. She was wearing a red sweater and black slacks, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands and absorbed in a report. Other pieces of corporate paperwork were spread around her and strewn over the coffee table and the floor. This tableau was essence of Amy—stock photography of Woman Working at Home. The scene looked so normal I felt like a ghost.
She glanced up when I was halfway down the stairs, and smiled. “Hey,” she said. “You made good time.”
“When did you get back?”
“This morning.” She looked confused but cheerful. “When I said I would. Jack, what’s going on?”
“I got a phone call late on Thursday,” I said. “From a guy who’d found your phone in the back of his cab.”
“Aha!” she said triumphantly, shifting paperwork off her lap. She bounced up and came to give me a hug. “I wondered if that’s what happened to it. I hailed the taxi off the street and couldn’t remember what company it was. There’s fresh coffee, by the way.”
“What?”
She nodded toward the kitchen. “You look like you could use some.”
“I’m fine,” I said, keeping my voice steady and calm. “Had a couple beers last night, that’s all.”
“A couple, right. And then a couple more couples? Nice dent you’ve got on your cheek there, teetotaler.”
“Amy, where the hell were you?”
“You know where I was, honey—Seattle. What I don’t get is where you’ve been. I mean, it’s cool, there’s no rule says you have to sit around like a hausfrau while I’m gone. But you seem kind of…Are you okay?”
I didn’t know where to begin. “Weren’t you due back yesterday?”
She gently led me by the hand up the stairs to the kitchen. “Exhibit A,” she said, pointing to the calendar stuck to the side of the fridge. An entry in her handwriting showed her leaving for Seattle on Tuesday and getting back Saturday morning. Today.
“I called your hotel on Thursday,” I said. “They had no record of you.”
“Which hotel?” she said, handing me a cup of coffee. It was too hot, and I didn’t want it.
“The Malo.”
“Honey, I told you I wasn’t staying there.”
I looked at her. “I don’t remember that.”
“I said I didn’t think it was so terrific an idea to use what’s basically the KC&H company hotel, when I was in town on scout. I could have run into anyone in the lobby, which would not have been cool.”
“What do you mean, ‘scout’?”
She smiled with affection—and a little exasperation. “Sweetie, we went through this, remember? We talked it through over dinner here—what, a week ago?”
I made a face that suggested I might be on the brink of recall, though in fact I wasn’t. “There you go.” She grinned. “The renowned Whalen brain clicks back in. I knew it would—I’m your biggest fan.”
“So why didn’t you tell me what hotel you were in?”
“I thought I did. Anyway, what’s the difference? We always talk on the cell.”
“But you had a note saying ‘Hotel Malo’ on your computer screen.”
“Yes, that’s right, Columbo—it’s a note to me. I left my book there on the last trip. It’s no huge deal, but it was a present and a signed copy, and I meant to call them before I left. I’m pretty sure I mentioned that, too. It was from Natalie last year?”
I rubbed my temples. “Why didn’t you call when you realized you’d lost your phone?”
She laughed. “I couldn’t remember the damn number. Isn’t that ridiculous? Though actually it’s kind of not funny. I think I’m getting old. Am I getting old?”
“No. The curse of speed dial,” I muttered as Blanchard’s smug face swam into my head. Simple lack of number recall, he’d said. She’ll be at home wondering where you are, he’d said.
“And the modern age in general, right. But listen.” She reeled off what I assume was my cell number. “I made a point of memorizing it this morning when I got back. Please feel free to test me on it at random intervals.”
I took a sip of coffee, trying to work out what my next ten questions should be, and in what order.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly more serious. “Were you worried?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Guy says he’s found your phone. I call the hotel I believe you’re at, you’re not there. I go to Seattle and there’s no sign of you. I even tried to file a missing-persons report.”
“What?”
“Exactly. Plus…I talked to Todd Crane. Trying to find where you were.”
She winced. “Really? That’s not so good.”
“Don’t worry, you’re fine. I said you were visiting a friend and I was just covering all bases.”
“You certainly were. Long way to go to pick up my phone, babe. I mean, it’s sweet, but I had it canceled ten minutes after I realized it was gone. A replacement will be here Monday.”
“Canceled?” I got the phone out and handed it to her. “I used this to call Bobbi this morning.”
She frowned. “Well, that’s weird. I’ll get onto it.”
“It’s okay. No sign anyone else tried to use it before I got a hold of it.”
“Sure. But if I cancel it, I want it canceled. You could have been anyone. It’s not good enough.”
More vintage Amy. I waited for her to show some sign of being uncomfortable with the fact that I’d had her phone in my possession, even used it. There was nothing. Instead she stepped a little closer.
“I love that you went looking,” she said. She touched my arm. “And I know that going to the cops couldn’t have been easy, and I’m really sorry I didn’t call. I just figured you’d know I was okay.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t live in a world where I assume people will be okay. I haven’t for a long time.”
“I know,” she said, quietly. “It was dumb. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I just got…”
“I know.” She kissed me, her arms warm around me. “Really. I promise.”
I stood under the shower for a long time, staring at the expensive limestone of the stall wall. I’d had very little sleep and was still suffering from a bad hangover, and so maybe that’s why I felt like I did. I realized that I hadn’t actually eaten anything the whole time I’d been away, which probably didn’t help.
When I was clean and dressed, I went to the kitchen and fixed some eggs. I ate them methodically, hunched over the counter and without registering them as food. My body felt stiff and awkward. I thought maybe I should go for a run, try to iron the kinks out, but the idea made me want to go throw up.
Amy was back in position on the sofa, sitting Indian style and surrounded once more by paper. She was absorbed and didn’t even sense me enter until I was a couple of yards away. I noticed that the paperwork seemed more text-dense than usual, bereft of bullet points and draft sketches, looking more like the product of a typewriter than a word processor. Also that the sheets didn’t sport the relentless logo-branding characteristic of KC&H documentation.
“What are you working on?”
She looked up. “Deep background,” she said, reaching out to gather some of the debris toward her. “And, frankly, bordering on the dull.”
“Going to let me know how it went, later?”
“Yes, sorry. Got a headful right now. Need to get it straight. And sorry it’s such a mess in here.”
“No problem. Going to try to do a little work.”
“How’s it going, scrivener man?”
“Very slowly.”
“Slowly as in…‘backward’?”
I smiled. “Maybe a little to the side.”
“Well, the journey of a thousand miles…”
“Starts with me staring out the window. Right.”
“I have faith. You’ll get where you’re going,” she said. “You always do.”
I went into my study, half closing the door behind me. I spent a while opening my research boxes and getting stuff out, making enough noise that it should be obvious what I was doing. Every book, magazine, or clipping made me want to grunt with boredom, but nonetheless I arranged them in piles on the counter. As I get older, I find I have a desire to have things in rows. Books, magazines, DVDs. I want them neat. I want them consecutive. I am coming to suspect that having the row may be more important than any specific issue or volume. It’s the order I seek, rather than the contents.
When this task was completed, I moved my chair to the far side of the desk, so the screen wasn’t facing the door. If need be, I could tell Amy I’d moved around to remove the distraction of the view, which was now behind my back, but she never entered the room when I was working. I was just being…what? Cautious? Sneaky? Weird, most probably. I opened the laptop, and the screen revealed itself once more, the same document with the same “Chapter 3” heading at the top. There were no chapters two or one. There was nothing written underneath “Chapter 3.” But then I wasn’t here to write.
I hesitated a moment. When I heard the distant shuffling of papers, confirming that Amy was still on the other side of the room, I got my cell phone out and put the laptop into “Bluetooth Receive” mode. When it was ready, I navigated through my phone to the relevant sections.
Then I sent to my laptop the things I had copied off Amy’s phone before I left Seattle.
I didn’t expect to be able to divine anything more from the text messages now that I was home, and I hadn’t bothered to take them off my phone. All I’d transferred were the pieces of music, the sound file, and the three photographs. I plugged earphones into the side of the laptop and loaded up the first sound file. Hearing it louder and without background noise just confirmed what I’d heard in the bar. It was a man laughing. I turned up the volume until the sound stopped meaning anything, in the hope of spotting some kind of texture behind it, an indication of where the recording had been made. I couldn’t hear anything. It was just a man laughing, somewhere neither unusually silent nor noisy. It had an unpleasant quality, but that could be because I didn’t like hearing another man’s laughter on my wife’s phone. She could have been messing with it in an idle moment and recorded a sound from another table in a restaurant.
The pictures didn’t do much for me either. They were bigger on my laptop screen than on the phone but remained dark and hazy, and I doubted I could recognize the guy if I saw him on the street. At first the other two pictures didn’t seem to be of anything at all. Darkness with some lighter patches. Gradually I made out that one seemed to have been shot across a convenience-store parking lot and showed a man entering the store. I couldn’t make out the second environment—a dark bar, perhaps?—but again there seemed to be a figure in it.
I put the files in a folder and lost it a couple of levels deep on my hard disk. Transferring them off Amy’s phone had felt like stealing, and I was pissed off that nothing more had come of it. I still had Blanchard’s words running around in my head, and I felt foolish. There was only one thing preventing me from feeling completely and utterly dumb, and I couldn’t check it right now.
I heard a sound and looked up to see Amy standing a couple of feet into the room.
“Hi,” I said, startled.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t want to disturb you. You looked deep in thought.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Bored, bored, bored,” she said. “Heading up to the village for a couple things. I don’t know what yet. You need anything while I’m finding out?”
For a moment I wondered why she hadn’t asked if I wanted to go with her. Then I remembered I was supposed to be working in here and that she was being considerate by not leading me into temptation. This, even more than the tableau I’d discovered her in on my return, was the essence of my wife. Subtle by nature, blunt when required, the kind of woman who would breeze into the bathroom while I was shaving and say, “Yo, shithead—you going to fix that shelf like you said, or do I have to take you back to Husbands-R-Us?” I brought this up with a yard-yelling couple one time, suggested they try a more direct approach to managing their nebulous resentments. I got a Christmas card at the precinct from them every year after that, signed “The Shitheads—still together.” I count it as one of my bigger successes on the force.